A Field in England starts as it means to go on: by plunging into thorny underbrush. The time period is the English Civil War, the image black-and-white, the air thick with battle drums and cannon smoke.

A man is fleeing the conflict, and he rushes headlong into a thicket, briars clawing at his eyes and the camera’s lens. His name is Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith), perhaps after the philosopher or the pimple, and he figures his chances of survival will be higher on the other side of the woods. When he emerges, he finds himself in a field with two more deserters (Peter Ferdinando and Richard Glover). They have just about swapped pleasantries when a fourth man (Ryan Pope) materialises and convinces them to join him on a tramp to a nearby pub.

On the way, they come to a circle of mushrooms, where they find, tethered to a rope, an alchemist called O’Neil (Michael Smiley), who mutters darkly about buried treasure. Together, the men start searching and digging, although what they finally unearth is more life-changing than any pot of silver.

A Field in England is by turns an abstract occult head-trip, a curdled Canterbury Tale and a comedy so dark you can barely see the end of your nose in it, which is one way of saying that it is the new film from Ben Wheatley. Wheatley is the busy director who in the last four years has brought us Down Terrace, Kill List and Sightseers: pictures so infested with ideas and riddled with self-assurance that they can single-handedly restore your faith in the future of British film-making. But they also make you cherish its past, and the influence of directors from Mike Leigh to Ken Russell pop up everywhere in Wheatley’s brief back catalogue.

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His latest feature is already a watershed moment for the industry, in distribution terms at least. A Field In England is the first film to be released in cinemas and on home entertainment formats, and broadcast on free-to-air television, on the same day. That represents something of a gamble by Film4, who financed the thing, although the film’s unusually lean £300,000 budget makes it a relatively safe one.

And the topsoil, at least, looks vaguely familiar. A Field in England claims kinship with the rural horror films that flourished in Britain in the Sixies and Seventies; doomy, sexy frolics with titles like Witchfinder General and The Blood on Satan’s Claw. The Wicker Man, the most accomplished of the set, was the first film to fully appreciate the blood-curdling power of acoustic folk music, and there are two musical interludes here – Lady Anne Bothwell’s Lament and Ring a Ring o’ Roses – that are as unnerving as anything sung by the residents of Summerisle as they frogmarch Edward Woodward’s policeman to their cliff-top barbecue.

But when it comes to business, Wheatley’s film cleaves to genre rules less often than it chops clean through them. The closest thing we get to a Sergeant Howie figure is Whitehead, and unlike the Wicker Man's saintly hero he is not the type to stew in his hotel bedroom while a naked Britt Ekland pounds her fists on the partition wall. As played by Shearsmith, he’s an unpickable knot of reason and faith; a Renaissance man with a thoroughly medieval core.

When O’Neil pulls Whitehead into his tent to prepare him for the treasure hunt, Shearsmith’s reaction must be the scariest thing I have seen and heard in the cinema in at least a year. First comes the scream: a strangled yell of pure, congealed terror, like a baby’s cry slowed to a baritone. Then he emerges with a look on his face that could make a hedgehog’s spines drop out.

What happens in that tent is never fully explained, although much of A Field in England, and particularly its psychotropic third act, will irritate viewers who prefer their plots unthickened. But the script, by Wheatley’s regular co-writer (and wife) Amy Jump, gives us plenty of interpretive wriggle-room, while the spiderweb delicacy of Laurie Rose’s monochrome photography draws us in even closer.

Some of its finest, and strangest, moments come when the cast freeze in a tableau vivant, invoking Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, maybe, or the illuminations in books where stories like A Field in England would have originally been scratched. All the details are right: the tranquil faces, the oddly angled limbs, the hands twisted into effete, come-hither poses. Wheatley’s extraordinary film shakes you back and forth with a rare ferocity, but the net result is stillness.